Outgoing Federal CIO Warns of 'IT Cartel' In DC 198
CWmike writes "In a wide-ranging discussion Friday with President Barack Obama's top science advisors, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra warned of the dangers of open data access and was sharply critical of government IT contracting, telling the committee: '...We almost have an IT cartel within federal IT' made up of very few companies that benefit from government spending 'because they understand the procurement process better than anyone else.' He added: 'It's not because they provide better technology.'"
And this applies exclusively to IT. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly. How does it work again?
1.) Get lowest bid proposal from committee insider.
2.) Make slightly lower bid to win contract.
3.) Win contract, and use money from contract to fund committee insider's re-election campaign.
4.) Rinse, repeat.
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In (most of) Canada we don't even open the bids until after the closing date. They sit in sealed envelopes.
Makes #1 impossible.
I would be surprised if the process wasn't similar in the US.
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Bahahaha.
In Manitoba we have a system in place on how to handle bribes ethically.
not kidding, and it's fucking sad.
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Bahahaha.
In Manitoba we have a system in place on how to handle bribes ethically.for the right price
there, fixed that for you.
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Sure, we do that, but in the US we used to only open the envelope from Haliburton.
Yeah, because Obama would never do that [foxnews.com], right? After all, he wouldn't break a campaign promise, would he?
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If you're going to slam Obama don't do it by linking to Fox News. You're making at least 89% of us discount your opinion (regardless of what it is) simply because of where you got the info.
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Exactly. How does it work again? 1.) Get lowest bid proposal from committee insider. 2.) Make slightly lower bid to win contract. 3.) Win contract, and use money from contract to fund committee insider's re-election campaign. 4.) Rinse, repeat.
Close.
However, item 2 is not a requirement. A lot more goes into deciding who gets the contract than lowest bid (such as how much the contractor donates to the congressman's campaign).
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You missed the part where you over-run the cost by a factor of 2-3 (thought the slightly higher bid was by a company with integrity that wouldn't of done such).
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Exactly. How does it work again? .
1.) Get lowest bid proposal from committee insider.
The issue is with #1, the “bid proposal”. We are talking about a risk adverse customer that is staffed by lawyers. Bureaucracies are punished when the fail but are not rewarded when they take risks that succeeded. So you get overlong contracts that contain highly technical requirements [from a legal, not technical viewpoint.]. Can you certify that all of your chips are from a approved foundry? That your employees are paid at the prevailing wage? [And it’s not the fact that you are paying t
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I still don't get it though. What the hell does being good with contracting have to do with open data access? Granted, both are issues, but they don't really seem to go together.
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They don't. He just happened to talk about both.
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Not any other area of federal contracting. No sir, this is exclusively an IT problem...
Don't put words in his mouth. He didn't say that. It also does not need to be a problem exclusive to one area to be a problem worth commenting on specifically.
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If federal government is anything like New York state I would agree (I would expect the feds to be even more so)
While there are rules around to prefer small and minority own businesses, their policies make it impossible for such groups to put their foot in the door. And don't blame just the Republicans or the Democrats they both added to the mess.
1. Open bidding isn't anything like an open bid. They take the resumes and profiles of companies they want to use and create a bid so only such company can win,
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Open bidding isn't anything like an open bid. They take the resumes and profiles of companies they want to use and create a bid so only such company can win, the bid. You will see odd things in the bids like 10 years FORTRAN experience required or 4 Years networking experiences for doing a VB6 to .NET conversion job.
So, can't we petition (some other branch of) the Government to make use of their pervasive surveillance powers, so that they can root out this wrongdoing? Surely that's one of the reasons that they created this monstrosity in the first place, to secure the State and its resources, right?
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Perhaps not, but IT is certainly a good place to start fixing the problem.
Re:And this applies exclusively to IT. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And this applies exclusively to IT. (Score:4, Interesting)
If he sees problems there, hell yes.
This whole BS MBA compartmentalized mentality is killing America.
Re:And this applies exclusively to IT. (Score:5, Informative)
But his larger point of knowing how to use the system and apply for the contracts...is what keeps the major few companies as being the only IT companies doing business with the feds.
The hoops you have to jump through are many. The larger contract houses have staff devoted to NOTHING but writing proposals. The small guy, cannot compete with this.
And even when there are contracts dedicated to SM's....the only way that truly works, is, the larger contract houses, *back* the small business and join to them...basically using them as a front to get the bids on the small business contracts.
They generally find a small company, it must be female or minority owned about 99% of the time, to get federal consideration.....then, the big guys basically do most of the proposal work, and the so call PRIME contractor that wins...gets a good kick of money in, but they really aren't in control of anything.
Happens all the time.
You'd need to rewrite the oversite rules...somehow...to try to prevent this. To make the application process simpler....but I don't see that happening any time soon. But, ever since they've been trying to make mandates that the Federal govt workers be more oversite and managers, rather than hands-on tech, you're gonna see more and more of this.
That and the situation that really kills the small companies off....is the hesitance of the feds to hire individual contractors as 1099's directly....they'd rather hire a large IT company which then wires the 'contractors' as W2 employees....giving you essentially the worst of both worlds.
You don't get the bill rate you should get as a true contractor, but you do get the lack of stability of a contractor. This bastardization of the contracting paradigm has really hurt things....
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The hoops you have to jump through are many. The larger contract houses have staff devoted to NOTHING but writing proposals. The small guy, cannot compete with this.
Sometimes they can. Maybe it helps to be stoned. [rollingstone.com]
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I would rather see government IT run by government employees of exceedingly high qualifications. Let's keep the spending and the responsibility in the same place. How often do we hear about all manner of abuse and waste by contractors who essentially do not answer to the citizens of the country? And besides that, we have a big problem of multiple vendors being hacked and they are housing all this sensitive data which should also be kept in-house. This crap is definitely out of hand.
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My brother writes these proposals (or something like them). He has been known to go on and on that his proposals win because he reads the RFPs and writes exactly what the RFP writer needs (or says they need) to make a decision. Mostly, he says, it's ticking off the boxes (they ask for A, they get A; they ask for C, they get C), but well-edited grammatical English is something he insists on from his team.
So can a small shop manage this? Yes, but it will probably take somebody away from development for a cou
Re:And this applies exclusively to IT. (Score:5, Insightful)
This whole BS MBA compartmentalized mentality is killing America.
I sooo much prefer the "Palinization" spewing word salad on any topic imaginable that they know nothing about...
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But..but...but...but... an MBA CEO is worth 4 million a year!
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Was your post an attempt at irony?
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One shouldn't open their mouth unless they can back it up. As CIO, he has the experience to be able to make his point about IT. He has the budgets, he has worked with the players, etc. That's not compartmentalization, it's simply discretion and good sense.
The difference between Vivek Kundra and someone like me is that if he talks, people will print it. He is a "senior official", and as such, even if he doesn't know anything about the defense budget or procurement process, people will listen to him talk
Re:And this applies exclusively to IT. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And this applies exclusively to IT. (Score:4, Funny)
Should the CIO of a company be calling out the Marketing Dept?
If they did, maybe we can get some actual honesty out of marketing.
Re:And this applies exclusively to IT. (Score:4, Insightful)
-CF
I think we need a new government agency... (Score:2)
This aptly describes the problem. (Score:3)
HSPD-12 badges (Score:4, Informative)
So, the infamous 'HSPD-12 badge', aka, the 'CAC card' ...
Supposedly they run $200 each. We all got bitched at for it ... have I *ever* used it to slot into a computer? Nope, because our network runs OSes that don't support the CAC functionality, and a lot of the folks on our machines aren't federal employees and remote users, so we'd have to have them run a background check (which we already do), then come in (from out of the country), finger print 'em, wait a month, then have them come back for a badge.
And then we'd have to issue them CAC readers and force them to use Windows or some OS that can use the CAC readers (MacOS? nope).
And if you loose the badge? Well, good luck on that one. Took me months to get a replacement. All the while, I couldn't enter any secured rooms, so I had to get issues a 'temporary' key card, and a 'temporary' badge ... which were EXACTLY like what we had before, only not at $200 a pop.
And the temp badges? They have HUGE text on them for the things that matter -- expiration date (the HSPD12 badges run for 5 years, no matter the length of your contract), affiliation (just says 'Contractor' in tiny type), and has an indication of your security access more than just foreign national / US cltizen / civil servant (I'm guessing because then they'd have to issue new people badges 3-4 times as their various background checks get done).
So ... more expensive, no new functionality that actually gets used ... and less secure, in that it's possible to enter the facility with an expired badge because the text is so tiny the guards can't read it, and they don't tie badge expiration to your contract, so a person with 1 year on their contract still gets issued a 5 year badge.
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I like how these are such a screw up and their name is a homophone for cock in a certain US accent. I can just see a Kennedy proposing these cards in some government meeting.
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The CAC readers we are working with also work on Linux and Mac. Every laptop we buy now has a built-in smartcard reader.
We're putting a lot of effort into making these work right now. The big driver is being able to dump RSA tokens and replace them with the CAC cards. We're counting down the days we can tell EMC/RSA "Fuck you very much" for their bullshit.
every made-in-china laptop? (Score:2)
made by companies that are part owned by the People's Liberation Army ?
im sure they didn't put any hardware backdoors in. nah.
At least there is a "concernt" for privacy (Score:2)
In particular, Kundra is worried about the "mosaic effect," the unintended consequence of government data sharing, where data sets are combined and layered in ways that can strip away privacy and pose security threats.
Now granted he probably isn't concerned with the privacy of the individual citizen but that of government officials, but at least it sounds like there are some privacy concerns.
he is describing wikipedia and blogs (Score:2)
if i am not mistaken.
and he is right.
when your local news says 'anti-terrorism operation happened today on the freeway, many trucks stopped', you might blow it off.
when you read a bunch of websites about what a VIPR team is, read its budget, read the congressional criticisms of it, then you starting getting antsy about it.
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So that would be Army, (Navy +Marines), and Air Force.
As for the Coast Guard, I think everyone would agree with you that they do not need a major data center.
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I would figure that the three major data centers for the US Government should be for Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches, and weren't referring to the Military. ;) In this case the Military should be under Executive Branch.
And, I've often wondered why we don't have a combined military force with divisions for Air, Marine and Land operations. I think it would eliminate a bunch of duplications across the current three branches. I'm sure there is some logical reason why this is completely unworkable,
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It does exist. It's called the Marines.
The Marines operate their own aircraft, their own tanks, and use their own ground personnel.
That's the entire purpose of the marines, to function as an all in one rapid response projected force that can be deployed to a hot zone to secure it while waiting for the army and air force to come in.
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Yup. Marines rock. Bad Ass to the core. (Corps). Kill the other branches of the military and call it good. You got my vote. Army, Navy and Air Force are for people who can't be Marines!
Re:How can you take him seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
explain to me why we need that much overlap? i understand the different roles that each branch fills.. but there is zero reason why each of them can't use the same data center.
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Are you serious?!? If that one data center is breached/destroyed/offline, the entirety of the US military has been laid bare. The is exactly the kind of situation multi-factor security and redundancy are designed to prevent.
On a separate, yet related, note, most major government data centers that are acknowledged by the government are owned and operated by the Department of Energy, even if they're used by other agencies (think National Laboratories).
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I assume they wouldn't have just one data center... but they'd consolidate all military data under one collective of centers distributed throughout the nation, buried in non-disclosed locations.
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LIkely impossible. Each branch has systems, of systems of systems....many undocumented (no, they don't actually know how they all really interract)...many of them stove pipe systems with maybe special interfaces (and yes, sometimes even these are still sneakernet) to talk to each other. Old OSes and hardware....it i
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If you read the comments before mine the guy was claiming that the CIO's comment of 3 data centers would be insufficient for the 5 branches of military.
my comment was wondering why the military would be unable to share data centers.
everyone knows that relying on a single data center would be stupid but then that would be one reason why he is recommending 3..
again back to the original question rather than "jumping to a conclusion" why exactly could the different branches of the military not share a data cen
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Why do you assume that only one of those three data centers would host military stuff?
What makes you think that just because computers are physically adjacent that they can talk to one another?
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If they're important enough to have classified information, the computers will not even be using the same network switches. VLAN hopping will therefore be a non-starter.
Re:How can you take him seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
So i assume the pentagon is a horrid idea and that we should never have the leaders of these branches in the same area as each other?
aside from your "cruse missile" (which by the way would work just as well now as it would then) comment the other stuff is already covered inside a data center - just because the info is in the same building doesn't mean the networks talk to each other - nor does it mean one side knows what the other is doing..
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Ah, but there's a way of dealing with the problem of having the leaders all taken out in what is known as a 'decapitation strike', as explained by General Buck Turgidson:
Plan R is an emergency war plan in which a lower echelon commander may order nuclear retaliation after a sneak attack if the normal chain of command is disrupted. You approved it, sir. You must remember. Surely you must recall, sir, when Senator Buford made that big hassle about our deterrent lacking credibility. The idea was for plan R to be a sort of retaliatory safeguard. I admit the human element seems to have failed us here, but the idea was to discourage the Russkies from any hope that they could knock out Washington, and yourself, sir, as part of a general sneak attack, and escape retaliation because of lack of proper command and control.
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Maybe he has in mind a different categorization: One data centre for each of the "common use cases" at http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#common-use-cases [amazon.com]
Why would one amazon/s3 be enough for everybody else :-)
Stephan
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In the era of cloud computing, you should be able to do everything with a single data center. You would have three for redundancy and to distribute the load.
Only one? (Score:2)
Surly the the armed forces need more then ONE! I know there is only one Pentagon, And that simple fact implies; That the Pentagon is basically irrelevant! The .mil crowed may not be rocket scientists, But you can be damn sure; That none of those people, Will ever "put all their eggs in one basket", .mil history is filled with commanders that did just that, they even have a name for it; EPIC brain fart!
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The military only needs one data center. Change the colors of the website based on the URI it's accessed through, if you want.
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Another comment that was silly was about contractors that stay quasi permanently in a position- do you really think it serves the best interests of the organization to turn over the staff every few years? That would be chaos.
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Three data centers is not enough to give each of the branches of the military its own dedicated data center for operations.
Do they each have their own road into the Pentagon?
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I don't take hime seriously because of this:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/ [dvorak.org]
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Why do they need to be separated. Sounds more like a pride issue than a resource issue. If anything we should be reducing the number of branches.
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The military is one place where consolidation doesn't work too well. Rules and lines of though get established within sections and deviation from that line of thought tends to be frowned on and will screw up your career.
A classic example of this was the tank in the US post WW1. There were three dominant lines of thought.
1. Merge the tank with the infantry and have it support the infantry as mobile pillboxes.
2. Merge the tank with the cavalry and have it perform the roles traditionally filled by the horse.
3.
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A classic example of this was the tank in the US post WW1. There were three dominant lines of thought.
I suggest:
4. To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
(aka no standing Armies)
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I would think that it would help to consolidate all military data centers into a few (for redundancy). Better logistics for internal data sharing, less transmission of data to other centers... heck, you may even be able to roll FBI and the other acronyms into this center as well. It could be the Defense Data Center.
I also figure the Tax, Social Security, and other public services could share one. You could call this the Internal Data Center.
I don't see why they each need their own building, infrastructure
Your Forgetting 2 (Score:2)
United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Corps
Shouldn’t all uniformed branches get their own data center? ;-)
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Would it make more sense to take down a portion of one branch's infrastructure rather than an equivalent part of each branch's infrastructure? You're assuming that each branch has one data center rather than each branch having two, three, or more. We're talking 3 data centers in your view to 15 data centers in another.
Regulatory Capture (Score:4, Insightful)
"'because they understand the procurement process better than anyone else.' He added: 'It's not because they provide better technology.'""
This is another example of Regulatory Capture [wikipedia.org], where private entities use the regulatory process created for the public interest to forward their private interests.
Whenever we open up complex regulatory regimes (such as the incredibly insane Federal government procurement process, campaign finance regulations, etc.), inevitably someone will figure out how to game the system for their private benefit.
The best regulations are simple ones, as complexity breeds gaming. Complex regulations also encourage corruption on the government side as well.
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The Republicans favor the rich.
The Democrats create law so complex that only the rich have the resources to follow.
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Regulations are designed to stop assholes, but don't nor can they.
I call it the law of assholes. Assholes exist, and will always dance on and around the edge of "legal". They can because there is no law against it, and that is where they live.
That is the way of the Asshole.
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Regulations have a declared intent of stopping assholes. They are designed to expand the government's reach and tilt the playing field in favor of the big fish.
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Exactly what I mean. You can't make being an Asshole illegal. The only thing you can do is kick the shit out of them when you have to. That is the only thing assholes understand.
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Where do you think complex laws come from? When you create simple regulations with broad language, you leave plenty of loopholes for companies to exploit. Then the government needs to close those loopholes by adding more specific language to the regulations. Companies find new loopholes in the regulations and the government responds with more complexity. So our options are to have simple laws that are widely exploited or have complex law
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The best regulations are simple ones, as complexity breeds gaming. Complex regulations also encourage corruption on the government side as well.
And yet those who call themselves "progressive" continue to advocate for ever more intrusive and pervasive regulations in the vain hope that some wonderful utopian society is waiting for them at the end of all the waste, fraud and abuse. Indeed, these are the very sorts of people that P.T Barnum was speaking of when he said, "there's a sucker born every minute". Whenever someone tells me that big government and regulation is the path to prosperity, I know immediately that one of two things is true: they hav
IT Cartel (Score:2)
Too many IT contracts are written with overly broad personell and systems security requirements, essentially requiring that the people working on these contracts originally coming from military or government offices to start with. Essentially built-in job security for those leaving government jobs.
Par for Course (Score:5, Informative)
Welcome to all government procurement of any sort. We have rules to prefer small businesses over big companies. So who gets this business? Not all the existing small businesses in town who know their product, can answer questions, keep stock on hand, are a generally helpful. They can't handle the bureaucratic overhead of government procurement.
Instead we have to buy from companies created for the sole purpose of being middle men to the government, whose only benefit is their understanding of the procurement process. Bonus points if they are owned by a woman or minority. They don't keep anything in stock, and add another 2-5 days to the shipping process compared to buying direct from the manufacturer. They are even more expensive than the local shops. They don't know what their products are used for and can only regurgitate what catalog in front of them says. But since they do so little they can turn over tons of revenue with only a few employees and thus remain a "small company".
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And typically they just sub-contract the system out to some large company.
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I worked for a government contract that was up for bid every 5 years. It was a small disadvantage business set aside. So basically ever 5 years I worked for a new company working at the same job, same desk, and with the same government people. Only the owners of the shell company that ran the contract changed.
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My company actually hired an employee specifically to handle procurement for one of our more needy government clients. We told them, "if this is how it's going to be, we are going to hire someone to do this and bill you for their time" and they were ok with it. Madness.
Companies take advantage of government money.... (Score:2)
Seriously... this is as obvious as saying that banks make money by taking advantage of existing regulations. It's deplorable, but it's not exactly surprising.
Not just an IT problem (Score:5, Informative)
General Dynamics, Raytheon, Boeing, Halliburton, etc provide a critical service: they understand government regulation. If you've ever seen a printed out copy of the Federal Acquisition Regulations, you'd be surprised that gravitational collapse isn't happening.
For most businesses, it's not worth taking a government contract until they're asking you to provide a COTS solution, where you know what you're selling, and the government pays you, and that's the end of it. The government is getting exactly what the commercial market gets. Firm Fixed Price contract, no surprises.
As soon as the government wants it customized in any way, and they're willing to pay you to customize it, that rabbit hole goes all the way down. Every stipulation of the contract must be assessed for compliance, and every assessment requires some kind of test, and every test has a schedule towards passage of the test, and every last one of these things costs time and resources, which means money, which the government is going to pay you, because the government wants its double cheeseburger in a way that no-one else wants it.
If you're an action oriented kind of entrepreneur, this will drive you insane. So you don't do it yourself. You go in as a subcontractor to one of the big Gov-BS-Handlers. You do the work, they firewall you from the BS, 50% for you, 250% for them (after change orders and spec changes and reviews and program management overhead) and everyone is happy with the $500 hammer (non-sparking, minimal toxic release, aircraft rated, 8 pound, loading bracket hinge, for the hitting of, one count)
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Many large private companies also are encumbered with such bureaucratic process. Many electric utility companies that are semi-monopolies insulated from the market vagaries are worse than government. They would casually spend 25 million dollars to "upgrade" from PeopleSoft 8.1 to PeopleSoft 8.2 or whatever. Actual work will be done by some H1-Bs who get paid about 65K a year, but his body-shopping Indian company would bill someone for 125$ a hour, fro
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And then there's an election and your contract gets cancelled by the new guys.
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Actually the $500 hammer might just be a $5 hammer, on a PO that has a limit of $500, used to purchase the $2500 tool that was deeply discounted to ... $500 along with 4 other items each costing $500 for something that normally would be $5.
This is because in order to procure the normally $2500 item, it would take walking a maze of stupid regulations and take two months.
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Your post reminds me of a story I heard about military procurement and Cobra radar detectors.
Apparently during some air force war games, the Americans noticed that the Israelis (?) were very adept at breaking missile lock-on so they asked about it. The Israelis pilots showed them these inexpensive Cobra radar detectors that they had mounted to the inside of their canopies which just happened to work great against the newer American targeting radars and gave the pilots an early warning. Not to be outdone,
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The regulations accumulated like that as the result of some grievously bad deal that happened a long time ago on a project you've never heard of. Because of this forgotten screw-up, Congress passed laws to require oversight and record keeping for this, that or the other detail.
Also, when Congress appropriates money in the budget, they allocate the money for certain purposes. In government, they call that "colors of money". Certain
Same old crap. (Score:3)
This is where the real government waste exists and this is exactly the sort of thing that will never be addressed. Instead useful programs are cut wholesale because that's what makes the most visible impact to your average ignorant voter.
A dollar spent is a dollar earned. (Score:2)
Now think about wasted money. Wasted money is not cash burnt in the fireplace. It is just money spent, without adequate or reasonable return. For the counterparty to that transaction that money is unearned revenue, undeserved profit. When you say government is wasting 300 billion dollars, it represents 300 billion dollars of un
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No, no, no.
This is "inefficiency."
Waste is when this sort of regulation doesn't exist, and the system purchases random junk that doesn't work for projects that stopped operating years before.
Fraud is when anyone in the chain knows that's happening and lets it continue because it means a paycheck.
Who is in the IT Cartel (Score:3)
1. IBM
2. Accenture
3. Booz Hamilton
4. Deloitte
5. SAIC
6. HP
7. CACI
8. CSC
Why do they win all the IT contracts? They have huge staffs dedicated to understanding the myriad of procurement rules. The little guys don't stand a chance.
Can you name some more.
SAIC's numerous failures (Score:2)
TRAILBLAZER
the New York City thing
etc etc etc.
did i mention that SAIC and NSA senior officials flip back and forth between working for the company and working for NSA?
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But if the cost to bid on a single contract is that you have to hire a dozen procurement specialists to figure out the requirement and procedures, then the initial cost will be too high for most IT shops. The feds need to simplify the way this whole process is done. And don't even get me started on sole provider contracts.
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Wait (Score:2)
This guy is suggesting that Federal Procurement isn't a process of objective evaluation where the best(as in most appropriate to requirements) products, services, and vendors are selected? What you say its system or rigged bids? You mean evaluation criteria is not select to best represent operational goals but instead to ensure a preferred vendor gets the contract? Wow crazy, never would guess that from casual observation of the past 40+ years of US history....
I am so glad we hire these qualified public
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Or released it on Wikileaks
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trying to distance himself. ha if he had any real balls, he would have named names and gave clear examples.
And he would've come out with this when he was still in charge. It's funny how he only has the balls to make this statement when he's on his way out already.